Internet dogs, dead children, bad laws

So a Federal jury has convicted Lori Drew of misdemeanors.

Ms. Drew, for those who have lost track, is the woman who, along with her daughter, perpetrated a childish hoax on a teenage girl--pretending to be a boy who liked said teenage girl. And then one of the participants in the hoax sent the teenage girl a message saying she wasn't liked anymore, and the teenager killed herself. And of course this is sad, and terrible, and a lesson to all parents: teach your child that nobody on the internet is necessarily who they claim to be, and supervise your kid's use of the online realm one way or another.

Note that the lesson, such as it is (and one would think it would be an obvious fact, and not something needing to be taught), is for the parents of depressed teens and not for those who perpetrate cruel online hoaxes. The number of people who participate in cruel hoaxes is perhaps infinite and unstoppable, and the majority won't be caught; and, in any case, if somebody is so bereft of conscience or pity that they pick on somebody half their age, well I doubt rumors of a distant criminal conviction would call them off. Some people are merely childish.

Let's acknowledge that Lori Drew isn't a terribly sympathetic person. She is old enough to know better, and should have counseled her daughter that whatever slights she perceived from the late teenager, Megan Meier, would be forgotten by the time she was 31, if not by the time she was 21. Lori Drew might have told her daughter--as useless as it would have been, because teenagers believe what they want to believe and every single scratch is a near-lethal goring--that she'd be lucky to remember the name "Megan Meier" by the time she was finished college; Drew didn't do this, and instead participated in a childish prank that led to a childishly depressing end.

But having acknowledged this, let us ask ourselves what kind of ridiculous world are we moving into if it's actually, unbelievably criminal to give a fake name when registering with an online service? Seriously--to give a fake name in the telecommunications realm is a tradition at least as old as the CB-radio "handle." To register a fake name with a social networking service or online company isn't exactly fraud, and prosecuting Lori Drew for possessing bad manners in the guise of prosecuting her fraud isn't merely moronic, it's dangerous.

Dangerous? Yes, because there are legitimate reasons one might publish under a pseudonym and register as a fictitious person. One might blog as a whistleblower or dissident, using the fact that nobody knows you're a dog online to make sure that nobody knows you're a corporate dog or a bureaucratic dog.

Hell, does somebody need that much of a reason? Maybe one registers online simply because he remembers an age when privacy was considered prudence, when a certain degree of anonymity was virtuous. You know: the days before Twitter and webcams and a constant telepresence; this isn't a criticism of the age, you know, after all, you're reading my blog right now, and my proper name, should you care, is at the bottom of this page with the rights and licensing boilerplate--I am kind of sort of part of the always-online age. But there are those who remember when privacy was something you didn't merely assume or expect but something you unironically claimed for yourself, and I can respect that.

I can understand why liars frustrate the service providers and the government. The former wants to sell you things and the latter is concerned you're a terrorist or pedophile (this is generous, I know--there are those who would say the latter wants to know what you're up to on general principle; I happen to be less paranoid than that, not because I'm naïve or an optimist, but because I cynically don't think government actually has the wherewithal to keep track of every single person's computer use with any degree of precision like some kind of Orwellian über-state; I'm sure they would if they could, but they have trouble finding their collective balls beneath their pajamas when they get up in the morning to take a leak). So the Drew case is a fine opportunity for them: an unsympathetic defendant who perhaps offers the precedent that signing on to an online service as "Mr. Screwyou" of "123 Fake Street" in the town of "Fuckov, AK" is a despicable and infamous crime, and everybody will take note and stop doing it. But everybody else ought to die a little inside at the thought of it.

Unfortunately for everybody, it sounds like the Federal jury "split the baby," as lawyers sometimes say: it sounds like they figured out that Lori Drew violated common decency but a dead teenager was too much to let slide, and so they convicted Ms. Drew of a lesser-included. So the Feds don't get their awesometacular precedent and everybody else loses an inch of the figleaf of online privacy, and the dead girl is still dead, oh well. There is a common enough aphorism in the law: "Bad cases make bad law." One must regret that the Lori Drew Catastrophe doesn't disprove it.